Nick Cave: ChatGPT will never write a great song, and I’ll tell you why

“I am the sinner, I am the saint / I am the darkness, I am the light / I am the hunter, I am the prey / I am the devil, I am the savior”. Nick Cave’s songs are full of saints, sinners, light and darkness, so this refrain could easily be a preview of the next album he has just started working on. And instead they are the verses of a song created with ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence platform capable of composing texts of all kinds. Even songs “in the style of Nick Cave”: this was the request of Mark, a New Zealand fan, who then decided to ask the real Cave what he thought. “It sucks”, it sucks, he wrote in the latest issue of the newsletter Red Right Hand, where he has been communicating without filters with the fans for years. But, being the most literate of today’s songwriters, it was also an opportunity to think again about the writing process and return to ideas and themes addressed in Faith, Hope and Carnagethe book-interview written with Sean O’Hagan (in Italian Faith, Hope and Carnagepublished by The Ship of Theseus).

“Songs are born from suffering, that is, they are based on the complex intimate struggle of creation, which is all human: as far as I know, algorithms have no feelings. The data does not suffer. ChatGPT has no inner existence, has been nowhere, endured nothing, lacked the audacity to go beyond its limits, and therefore lacks the ability to share a transcendent experience, as it has no limits to be transcend”. Here Cave takes up an answer to a similar question posed a few years ago by another fan: “What a great song makes us feel is a sense of awe. There’s a reason for that. The sense of awe is based almost exclusively on our limitations as human beings. It has everything to do with our audacity as human beings pushing beyond their potential.” But there is no amazement in a song created by an artificial intelligence, but only style. Better: imitation, replica, parody of a style.

Cave applies to an area in which he is a master, writing, a rather common concept in philosophical reflections on artificial intelligence: that is, that it is not capable of thinking, but only of producing something that has the appearance of thought. On the other hand, the Turing test goes something like this: a machine is considered intelligent if its responses are capable of fooling a jury of humans into believing they are dealing with a human.

“What makes a song great isn’t its resemblance to a recognizable work,” observes the Australian-born songwriter, however. “A good song isn’t imitation, replica or pastiche, it’s the other way around. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all that has been attempted in the past. It’s those dangerous, heart-pounding shots that catapult the artist beyond the limits of what he recognizes as his own self. This is part of the authentic creative struggle that precedes the invention of a unique text that is really worth something; it is the confrontation at the last breath with one’s vulnerability, one’s danger, one’s smallness, opposed to a sense of sudden and shocking discovery; it is the liberating art gesture that shakes the listener’s heart, in which the listener recognizes his own blood, his struggle, his suffering in the inner workings of the song”.

They are arguments full of passion, of those who wrote masterpieces such as Mercy Seat, Into My Arms or Girl In Amber, who describe the songs as a meeting place with God, or “a way of talking about the future”. In his previous reply, Cave had mentioned le 21 lessons for the 21st century by Yuval Noah Harari, saying that maybe we will really have songs created by artificial intelligence capable of arousing the feelings we want; joy, courage, desire. “Artificial intelligence may be able to write good songs, but certainly not great songs,” he said. This time he was more direct in his judgement: “she is bullshit, a grotesque mockery of what it means to be human”. And it refers only to the text, because no one has yet thought of sending him the music that ChatGPT could write.

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